Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga

A review by Anis Shivani

It is difficult to build on a book as successful as The White Tiger, which won the 2008 Booker Prize, and is a substantial addition to the canon of Indian diasporic writing. The White Tiger is about a hyper-ambitious Indian driver who takes revenge on an unjust economic and political system. Set in the twenty-first century, it describes an India in the throes of globalization, amid the milieu of international call centers and falling bourgeois values.

Adiga has written not so much a follow-up as a shattering of the clear, one-sided lens through which we read The White Tiger. Between the Assassinations is less an expansion of novelistic possibility than a willful step back to explain the raw emotions that went into the earlier book. Where The White Tiger is highly finished, voice-driven, and ferociously cogent and consistent, Between the Assassinations is determinedly un-centered, resists completion, and lacks the idiosyncratic private voice that often characterizes the postcolonial ...

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